Recent technologies have made it easy and cheap to clone anyone’s face, voice, or body. These hyper-realistic digital artifacts can make a person seem to be, say, or do something they did not and, in many cases, would never do.
So far, laws have tried to address this new phenomenon in a piecemeal fashion: by giving people a property right over their likeness which they can sell to the highest bidder, by criminalizing nonconsensual pornography using someone’s likeness, and by targeting scams that use someone’s likeness to deceive victims into financial losses.
These laws do not protect peoples’ integrity and dignity in their identities, however. They do not address the emotional, psychological, and reputational harms that people experience when they lose control over who they appear to be to others. Instead, these laws reduce the complexity of identity into financial harms, like losing out on business opportunities for actors and performers.
To close these gaps, TJL developed the “My Likeness, My Right” model bill. It provides a dignity-based right to everyone over their likeness, whether they are famous or not, and protects everyone against likeness abuse caused by nonconsensual digital replicas. It gives people a right to sue developers of technologies that facilitate these replicas while protecting constitutional speech, including parody, satire, and newsworthy replicas. By grounding the right in dignity, not property, the law avoids creating a market incentive for trading in likeness and recognizes that our ability to shape our public selves is deeply personal, and deeply private.
An earlier version of the bill was introduced by lawmakers in Georgia (2025) and Minnesota (2025). The current version has been introduced in Kansas (2026), and several other lawmakers across the country are poised to introduce the bill in coming sessions.